As we shared in another post recently, one of our SEO clients has been enjoying immense website success since COVID-19 began, despite being in the hard-hit travel industry.
At the end of 2019 we commenced our SEO services for Out of the Ordinary Outback (OOTOO), a tourism company based in the New South Wales Outback that offers tours and accommodation in Broken Hill and beyond.
They came to us wanting to gain website traffic for keywords related to accommodation, caravan parks, and tours in the NSW Outback. They’d not done any previous SEO work on their site and, as a result, had near zero organic traffic.
So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work!
Then a few months later, COVID-19 hit and the world stopped travelling. Nearly everyone has felt the negative effects of the pandemic, but few as much so as those working in travel. It would have been understandable if OOTOO had wanted to cut back all spending during a time when business is down and sales have dwindled to zero.
But they were dedicated to setting themselves up for success in later months and knew that if they invested time and money into optimising their website now – at a time when hardly anyone else (including their competition) is – they’d be able to reap the benefits once people started researching and booking travel again.
Their investment has already paid off. In June, once Australians were able to travel domestically again, OOTOO saw a substantial increase in both keyword rankings and organic traffic.
In June, their organic traffic was nearly 6x higher than it was in January:
Organic traffic.
This massive increase in organic traffic is directly correlated with their gain in keyword rankings. Since January, they have experienced a 30% increase in keyword visibility: that is, they have more of their desired keywords appearing in Google’s Top 100 search results.
In fact, at the time we published this article (August 2020), they have 15 of their keywords appearing on page one of Google.
So not surprisingly, landing in Google’s Top 10 for those keywords has resulted in substantially more clicks to their website, hence the rise in organic traffic.
Keyword rankings.
So how did we pull this off, you might be wondering? Let us share what we did to optimise the OOTOO website:
SEO Services for OOTOO: What We Did
We’ve done quite a bit of SEO work on their website over the past 8 months, but here are some of the highlights:
- Reviewed ~5000 backlinks and disavowed the spammy ones (did you know that links from a spammy site can have a negative impact on your SEO?)
- Did keyword research on their desired keywords and revised/expanded their keyword list based on search volume and competition score
- Created both a Google Analytics and Google Search Console property and integrated them with the website so that metrics are being tracked
- Added internal links to all pages and blog posts
- Corrected any technical errors that came up on the site audit
- Added/configured a plugin to speed up the website loading time